


my hands and my dignity

by tajargirl



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Movie: Star Wars: The Last Jedi, in that i am trying to fix plot holes with spackle and a can-do attitude, lack of trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-03-24 04:44:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13803669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tajargirl/pseuds/tajargirl
Summary: Poe Dameron is the only soldier of the Resistance to have ever escaped custody on the Finalizer. Poe Dameron was aided in his escape by a Stormtrooper, the only Stormtrooper to ever join the ranks of the Resistance. Poe Dameron looks at that Stormtrooper like he hung the moon. Poe Dameron just returned from a heroic mission that permanently eliminated the bomber capabilities of the Resistance.Poe Dameron wants to know what her plan is.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _They said what a waste of a pretty girl,_   
>  _To let the labor flag unfurl._   
>  _I said what more can you take from me?_   
>  _I own my hands and my dignity._
> 
>  
> 
> _So, pass me a match and we'll strike it on the ground,_  
>  _And we'll head back down to Boston town._  
>  _We could start a fire and they'll never put it out,_  
>  _We'll head back down to Boston town._

Amilyn Holdo is in the fresher when the proximity alert goes off. She has just latched the door and taken one deep, gasping breath when the distinctive siren sounds, warped by the barrier between her and the bridge. She takes a second breath, and the failure of the bombing run falls away. All those lives, all those resources. She takes a third, and forgets D’Qar. The mad rush to get birds in the air, transports loaded by grim-faced locals who knew there was no berth on any ship for them, the backburn of the _Ninka_ leaving atmo obscuring her last view of their planet. She takes a fourth breath and opens the door.

The _Ninka_ runs like clockwork stripped down to its bare essential gears. Leia gave Amilyn an Alderaanian timepiece once, decades ago. The interlocking pieces of the face would shift and reconnect as she circled the planet, the hands holding a steady course. Amilyn suspected it had far more value than Leia assigned to it at the time. The piece has been stuck for years, the hope of replacement parts destroyed with Alderaan. The _Ninka_ ticks on, though, carrying out orders beat by beat. Reverse. Rotate the shields. Clear for launch traffic. Full engines ahead. Concentrate rear shields. Full engines ahead. Full engines.

Amilyn sits in the command chair, eyes on the fleet outside the viewport, her soldiers moving around her. She watches as TIE fighters tear through the bridge of the _Raddus_ , and when the fleet clears the debris field, the first thing she does is board a shuttle. The second thing she does is come up with a theory. The third thing she does is make a plan.

*****

Leia is alive, under circumstances hesitatingly relayed by Commander D’Arcy. Amilyn doesn’t care about the particulars. She thinks about the history of interstellar travel, and a paper she had written at the Academy for some sort of Galactic history breadth option. The two brothers who created the first working hyperdrive engine had been a pair of speeder mechanics from Taris. They never in their lives left atmo together, so that if one was blasted apart at the speed of the light, the other could continue the work.

Commander D’Acy has assembled the remaining crew of the _Raddus_. She tells them that Leia, General Organa, would want them to save their sorrow until after the fight. Amilyn is very aware of how purple her dress is. These people don’t know her yet. They’re in grease- and sweat-stained flight suits, and they have been awake as long as she has. Commander D’Acy says her name.

Amilyn comes to the center of the room. She looks around herself. Some crewmembers are angry, some are scared. Some are so steeped in grief she can nearly smell it underneath the bacta-and-cockpit stench. Some are so exhausted that the ability to feel sorrow would be a welcome relief. She looks at each of them, and she tells them that they are the spark, that will light the fire, that will restore the Republic. She tells them the spark must survive.

*****

Amilyn finishes speaking, and her new crew is off with the purposeful movements particular to soldiers unsure what they should be doing, and hoping to figure it out before anyone important notices. From the other side of the room, she hears a voice.

“That’s Admiral Holdo?” _Yes_. “Battle of Chyron Belt, Admiral Holdo?” _There are four hundred people left in the fleet. How many Admiral Holdos do you think there are?_ “Not what I expected.” _Clearly._

To her surprise, the voice approaches her, and she recognizes the associated face. Leia had loved Poe Dameron, not like she loved her son, but with similar intensity. He had been the spiritual child of the Resistance since the moment he went from being the son of young, hotshot pilot Shara Bey to being the son of dead, tragic pilot Shara Bey. He keeps talking, but Amilyn already reviewed the records. Leia Organa’s last official act had been to demote Poe Dameron to Captain. Captain, the highest rank a pilot could hold and still have no business whatsoever being on the bridge.

“What’s our plan?” he asks, guileless.

Poe Dameron is the only soldier of the Resistance known to have ever escaped custody on the _Finalizer_. On the _Finalizer_ , Poe Dameron underwent torture by Kylo Ren. Amilyn pictures two pairs of little boys’ feet, dangling from the limbs of a blue-green tree on Yavin. Poe Dameron was aided in his escape by a Stormtrooper, the only Stormtrooper to ever join the ranks of the Resistance. Poe Dameron looks at that Stormtrooper like he hung the moon. Poe Dameron just returned from a heroic mission that permanently eliminated the bomber capabilities of the Resistance. Amilyn hears two little boys, their giggling echoing down the hallways of a starship.

Poe Dameron wants to know what her plan is.

Amilyn shuts him down.


	2. Chapter 2

The fleet has eighteen hours of fuel left. There is the slight rumble of space debris, then nothing.

*****

The fleet has twelve hours of fuel left. The silent space before the First Order ship is shrinking. Amilyn thinks of music lessons from long ago. Longa rest, breve rest, minim rest, quaver rest. Ways to measure the length of an absence. Leia has always been able to play so beautifully. Amilyn never dropped a note, but Leia could capture the emotion of a piece, her whole body wrapped in the feeling of it.

*****

The fleet has six hours of fuel left, but the _Anodyne_ has no time left at all. Amilyn is on comms with her commander when it finally happens. He tells her it’s been an honor. He calls her _admiral_. He calls them _rebels_. He vanishes into the pitch-black of space.

Lieutenant Connix reminds her of the six hours. Amilyn has a timepiece in her head, ticking over and over. The thing is, Connix wants so badly to do the right thing that the air around her is practically vibrating with it. But that impulse is tainted by loss and confusion and uncertainty, uncertainty so strong that Amilyn can sense it the way she can smell the Stormtrooper’s bacta-clean and Dameron’s straight-from-the-cockpit stench. If Amilyn could she would take her aside, freeze her in time, and let her process her way into a world where the Resistance is composed of under four hundred people. Under three hundred and ninety-nine, she thinks absently, remembering the commander of the _Anodyne_.

If she could take Connix aside, she would tell her that the fleet may have six hours of fuel remaining, but that the abandoned base on Crait is less than six hours away. She would tell her that it’s a shithole, but a shithole with blast doors and a comms system that can reach the Outer Rim. She would tell her the plan. But she would also explain the intricacies of hyperphysics, and why the principles governing sub-lightspeed trackers can’t be generalized to faster-than-light travel. But the First Order found them anyway. So.

She would sit her down and gently point out the cloaked binary beacon wrapped around the hero Stormtrooper’s wrist, screaming out its location to the stars, desperate to bring its other half home.

The plan lives on in the dark. The spark that is the Resistance is cradled in one pair of cupped hands. Amilyn maintains the course.

*****

The fleet is critically low on fuel. The ship is, rather. Amilyn hadn’t had a spare moment to watch the _Ninka_ disintegrate into the void. She’s directing the preparation of the transports, and also, Poe Dameron is making a scene on her bridge. She calls him _flyboy_. He calls her _lady_ , and also _coward_ , and _traitor_. He even kicks something across the room. Damerons always could do a nice scene, she thinks.

He knows they’re fueling up the transports, now. That requires too much activity, too much manpower to be kept from the crew at large. She has him removed from the bridge, and holds Crait close to her chest. They’re almost there.

*****

Amilyn can practically see Crait through the viewport when Dameron tells her the stupidest plan of all time. Apparently Lieutenant Connix is not the only one who needs a refresher course in hyperspace physics.  There’s a bubble of near-incandescent rage rising in her throat, and she pushes it back down. She has already turned to dismiss him, to move on to something other than the theater of Poe Dameron, when he pulls a blaster. He tells her she is removed from command for the survival of the _Raddus_ , of the Resistance. He has friends with him. He always was a charmer. She tells him she hopes he knows what he’s doing.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m going to the bridge.” In this, at least, he is telling the truth.

*****

The problem with being held hostage is that it becomes boring almost immediately. Amilyn was held for nearly five weeks once on Vodran, before Leia and her people came for her. Stars, the woman could pull off a poncho back in the day. Anyway, this time Amilyn has been held for barely five minutes when she breaks the steam pipe, grabs a blaster, and gets ready to rumble. Within moments, though, the bay doors are opening with a rush of air, alarms blaring in the background.

It’s Leia. Of course it’s Leia.

*****

Finally, finally, they’re loading up the transports. Amilyn sees Poe Dameron on a gurney, Leia-beloved and Leia-forgiven and vouched for by General Organa herself. Amilyn calls him _troublemaker_ , but she also says she likes him. In this moment, it’s even true. Dameron is a rebel, through and through. She’s thinking of the commander of the _Anodyne_. _Godspeed, rebels_ , he had said. Amilyn likes the way that rings through the air.

Amilyn looks to Leia, the woman who taught her to take her losses as they fall. Amilyn never trusted the Force, really. She believed in a power beyond her comprehension—she hung around the edges of Luke Skywalker’s blazing, glorious youth too often not to. She knew that parts of him and his sister were not born of man, and she never knew those parts as being with her or against her (tiny Ben Organa slamming the door on his nursemaid’s finger, tiny Poe Dameron looking up in startled awe). But as she and Leia speak, and stutter, and smile at one another for the last time (Leia on a terrace drinking ruge liquor, bathed in an Alderaanian sunset and _grinning_ ), Amilyn believes. She thinks maybe the not-being is the point.

Amilyn walks back to the bridge. She feels, viscerally, her oldest friend settling down onto a bench, Poe Dameron close by her side. She imagines light filling the pitch-black, and settles too, into the command module. They’re firing on the transports now, and she’s relieved there’s only one thing to do, a right thing, when you get it so hopelessly wrong. She wishes her sword were more literal. She starts the engines, checks the coordinates. She’s glad she wore the purple dress.

She jumps. She falls.

*****

Everything is quiet.

**Author's Note:**

> The question we all have is this: why wouldn't Admiral Holdo tell the rest of the Resistance her plan?
> 
> I sent [this ask](http://leupagus.tumblr.com/post/168812996088/12-heres-how-the-holdo-plot-would-have-been) to leupagus on tumblr, outlining my answer: because someone in the rest of the Resistance is going to tell the First Order. This is that concept, given legs.
> 
> Title is from Boston Town by Della Mae.
> 
> I am [on tumblr](http://tajargirl.tumblr.com).


End file.
